Environment & Poverty Times

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The UNECE (United Nations Economic Commis ion for Europe) Con-
vention onaccess to information,public participationand access to
justice in environmental matters - known as the Aarhus Convention -
aims at strengthening the role of the public and NGOs in protecting
and improving the environment. Through recognition of people's
rights to information,participation and justice, it aims to promote
greater accountability and transparency in environmental matters.
Access is the key
Justice is our right
Information is power
Participation enriches
Biodiversity contributes to poverty reduction and livelihoods of rural and urban communities through crop
diversity; preventative and curative medicines and supplements; use or sale of plants,wood,seeds,skins and
other products and genetic resources; buffering the impacts of extreme events such as floods,droughts,
fires and other hazards and many other means.
The Equator Initiative is aimed at strengthening community partnerships for poverty reduction through
conservation and sustainable use of biodiver sity in the equatorial belt.
Biodiversity and Communities
The Equator Initiative
India's vil lages need proper power
Kenya’s disenfranchised pastoralists
Computerization and land r egistration
Andhra Pradesh, India
disempowerment
ENVIRONMENT AND POVERTY TIMES - 15
ndia’s “joint forest management”
programmes have been widely
touted as giving communities grea-
ter control over forests and a higher
share of forest revenues. State forestry
departments sign agreements with
local representatives in which the
government promises to finance local
plans, forest guards, tree nurseries
and other activities and to let resi-
dents keep some of the earnings from
selling forest products. The local
representatives in turn agree to con-
serve their forests and to follow the
programme’s rules. The World Bank
and other agencies have spent hun-
dreds of millions of dollars on these
programmes.
Inmany places the results have proba-
bly been positive. But Madhu Sarin’s
“Disempowerment in the name of
participatory forestry? - Village fo-
rests joint management in Uttara-
khand” points out the dangers of ap-
plying one single model in diverse
contexts and of participatory sche-
mes that do not take account what
people are already doing.
The Uttarakhand region in Uttar
Pradesh has over 6,000 community
forests, one of which is located in
Pakhi. In 1958 the elected forest
council of Pakhi received the right to
manage a 240 hectare forest, which
women use to collect fuelwood,
fodder, leaf litter and other products
for their families. For years the local
women’s welfare association control-
led the forest and kept it in good con-
dition. The association decided how
to use the forest and paid a woman
guard, through voluntary contribu-
tions, to fine anyone not observing
the rules.
When the village leaders agreed (with-
out consulting village women) to
enter the Village Forests Joint Mana-
gement programme in 1999, the
women lost control of their forest.
The local men, who had previously
showed little interest in the forest,
used project money to hire three male
forest guards and fired the woman
guard. Conflicts broke out over the
funds for the village forest plan and
the tree nurseries.
The Forestry Department now makes
key decisions about how the forest
will be used. It has marginalized the
women’s welfare association and
turned the men and women in the
village into wage laborers. The villa-
gers need money but they did not
realize this would come at the cost of
no longer being able to manage their
forest.
The Village Forest Joint Management
programme looks good on paper. Un-
fortunately the villagers of Pakhi do
not live on paper.
Madhu Sarin
CIFOR
Extract from CIFOR’sPOLEX newsletter, available
at
ost of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley,
an area too dry for cultivation
but free of the tsetse fly, was
traditionaly used as grazing land by
the pastoral Masai and Samburu tribes.
The tribes’ seasonal
migratory grazing
patterns maintained
the savanna as a sui-
table habitat for wild-
life – cur ently the cor-
nerstone of Kenya’s
profitable tourism in-
dustry.
Under colonial rule,
many of the traditio-
nal grazing areas used by the Masai
and Samburu tribes were declared
wildlife reserves or acquired for large-
scale cultivation. Many pastoralists
were displaced from these new reserves,
where human activity was prohibited,
disrupting traditional management of
the savanna and restricting access to
vital water sources.
Each Masai now has
about 100 hectares –
not enough for the
average herd of cattle.
Restrictions on the
entry of livestock into
nature reserves cou-
pled with the ability
of wildlife (vs. fenced
herded livestock) to
leave unfenced natu-
re reserves onto land used by the Masai
has degraded the Masai’s curent
grazing areas (1).Herdsmen have,as a
consequence,been forced to use other
grazing areas that were traditionaly
avoided (areas with parasites etc.).
Recognition that the seasonal grazing
of livestock can maintain savanna areas
and adoption of a “landscape” ap-
proach to conservation (where wild and
domesticated animals graze in the same
areas at dif erent times of the year)
could lead to constructive partnerships
between pastoralists and the tourism
sector. Decentralization – which will
encourage tribal representation,margi-
nalized since colonial rule – will be
critical in ensuring that tribes are no
longer displaced from their traditional
lands and that Kenya’s savannas are
retained and managed (2,3).
An. Ba. and .
1.Personal Communication: Ole Kamuaro Ololtisatti,
Purko Maasai,Kenya, 2001.
2. Cheeseman,T.,Conservation and the Maasai in
Kenya: Tradeoff or Lost Mutualism?, 2002,
3. Sindiga, I., Tourism and African Development:
Change and Chalenge of Tourism in Kenya, African
Studies Centre, Leiden,1999.
DANIEL KARIUKI - “Woodland mothers” (1992)
DANIEL KARIUKI - “The giraffes” (1994)
Buying property in Andhra Pradesh used to be complex and
take a long time.After the purchase the buyer visited the
local office of the Sub-Registrar of Assurances in person,had
the property valued and stamp duty calculated, purchased
stamp paper and had a writer draft the deed in the requisite
legal language. The purchaser also had to provide additional
documents related to income and other properties owned.
All these documents were then scrutinized by the registrar,
and recorded, before an exact copy of the final deed was
copied by hand and certified.
In Andhra Pradesh,387 subregistrar offices registered about
1.2 mil ion documents a year, 60 percent of them for agri-
cultural land. A yearly manual update of property infor-
mation was carried out, since hundreds of thousands of
property files were updated with the new sales from the year.
Land registration offices throughout the state are now
equipped with computerized counters under the Computer-
aided Administration of Registration Department (CARD)
project, initiated and financed by the state government to
improve efficiency and increase duty collections. Starting
with a pilot project in 214 locations over 15 months, the
entire database was transferred to computers, the copying
and filing system was replaced with imaging,and al back-
office functions were automated.Standardization and greater
transparency in property valuation procedures boosted stamp
duty revenues.Registration processing time was cut from
ten days to one hour.
Source: Subhash Chandra Bhatnagar, Indian Institute of Management,
Ahmedabad,World Bank,E-Government Focus Group,2000,available
at
The Aarhus Convention
I
M
Under colonial rule, many of
the traditional grazing areas
used by the Masai and
Samburu tribes were
declared wildlife reserves or
acquired for large-scale
cultivation